Vesta wanted to ram him to drop a lifeboat on him, to wreck him in any way possible; but Thlaskin refused. Captain Cloud would be mad enough at what they’d done already—any such rough stuff as that would be altogether too damn much! And, since the rebels’ jets were still on the ground, Number One had reached sanctuary unharmed.
Yellow Castle, however, was not as impregnable as the gangsters had supposed. They had armor, true, but it was not at all like Cloud’s. They had weapons, true, but nothing even faintly resembling the frightful semi-portable projectors of the Galactic Patrol—nothing even remotely approaching the Patrol’s beam-fed needle beams.
Thus the Tomingans, Tommie and Jim, stood in armor of proof scarcely an arm’s length from Yellow Castle’s heavy steel door and burned it down into a brooklet of molten metal. Then on in; blasting down everything that resisted and, finally, everything that moved. Nor did any gangster escape. Those who managed to avoid the armored pair were blasted by one of the other semis or speared by one of the needles.
Yellow Castle, already furiously ablaze, was left to burn. Jim, after giving instructions as to how his lieutenants were to dispose of such small fry as might be left alive in the city proper, helped his sister load the Blaster’s weapons and armor into a ground-car. They drove out into the middle of a great open field. The flitter landed; Cloud’s borrowed equipment was hauled aboard. Tommie and Jim followed it.
“If you were really smart, I think you’d flit right now,” Vesta said to Tommie. “Captain Cloud isn’t going to like this a little bit.”
“I know it. I’m not smart. This was worth anything he cares to do about it. Besides, I want to thank him myself and tell him good-bye in person.”
The flitter took off and returned to her mother-ship. Tommie and Thlaskin put her away, then the peculiarly assorted six went up to the control room and faced the quietly seething Tellurian.
Not boldly—only Tommie and Nadine were really at ease. Jim was defiant. Thlaskin was nervous and apprehensive; Maluleme was just plain scared. So was Vesta—her tail drooped to the floor; she seemed to have shrunk to four-fifths her normal size; her usual free-swinging, buoyant gait had changed almost to a slink.
Cloud stared at Nadine—chill, stern, aloof; an up-to-date Joan of Arc or a veritable destroying angel—nodded at her to synchronize with his mind. She did so, and her mind bore out everything implied by her attitude and expression. She was outraged to her innermost fiber by the conditions she had just helped to correct.
“You were the prime operator in this thing,” he thought, flatly. “With your knowledge of law and your supposed respect for it, how could you take it into your own hands? Become part of a law-breaking mob?”